He cites ‘STP’ as one example. Not the motor oil, by the way, but an acronym for an equally obscure item of management-speak.

On its own the acronym doesn’t give much away. What does it stand for? ‘Sustainability and transformation plan’. Hmm; none the wiser?

Sustainability and Transformation Plans have the power to re-shape the health system because they reduce hospital services and offer care at community level instead.

It’s an example of a dramatic change masked by jargon that is impossible to understand. Some insiders have dubbed ‘STP’s ‘sticky toffee puddings’, possibly to avoid the inevitable political and media backlash to everything the health service tries to do.

The NHS is rather too fond of jargon-filled communication, though.

For example: an ‘ambulatory patient pathway’ isn’t a hospital corridor. It’s a convoluted way of saying that a patient can go home after being seen in hospital.

There are 50 Vanguards in the NHS. Do you know what they are? Not advancing armies but, “Each vanguard is taking a lead on the development of new care models which will act as the blueprints for the NHS moving forward” or as you and I might say, a practical way to test new ways to run patient services.

‘Operational Pressures Escalation Levels’ are now used to describe how busy a hospital is.

Triggle reports that the Plain English Campaign (PEC) has labelled the language the NHS uses as “simply gobbledygook”.

PEC spokesman Steve Jenner says it is difficult for the public to understand what’s going on: “I can’t help thinking that [situation] suits the NHS sometimes”.

If the purpose of communication is to convey information, and it is, to cloak the facts in jargon obscures that information. The NHS, above all fails to communicate and tell patients and users the unvarnished truth.

Schools that send pupils on trips to London and elsewhere routinely provide their students with practical advice about security and how they can help keep themselves and their friends safe. This advice is now standard operating communication in schools.

But, to parents as well as pupils and other folk going about their lawful business, security messages have started to sound like charity appeals. They blur into one relentless monologue and, whoever we are, we generally tend to tune out the warnings unless there’s an armed policeman barking orders at us. Oh, and here’s a tip: best not run towards her or him as that can be misinterpreted as an act of aggression and end badly.

A thoughtful piece by psychologist Stephen Grosz, published in the FT Magazine in 2011, a snippet of which is below, contains important clues about personal survival. Its content communicates clearly, and illustrates vividly, why one crucial element to surviving a terror incident is to take control of your own life rather than wait for instructions; instructions which may well come too late.

You can find a full version of the piece, which forms a chapter in his book, along with other fascinating insights into the human psyche in Grosz’s The Examined Life. You never know; it might just save your life, limbs or loved ones.

https://inl.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NEW-INL-LOGO-2017-WEB-1.png00John Blauthhttps://inl.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NEW-INL-LOGO-2017-WEB-1.pngJohn Blauth2017-04-03 12:29:412017-04-03 12:29:41Should you run towards, or away from, a policeman who is holding a gun?

You’re waiting for a bus on a frosty morning. You notice that “the traffic’s not too bad”.

Now that’s an understatement. You’re using double negatives to express a positive.

If the traffic’s not too bad, it’s good. If you’re not unaware, you know. And if you’re not as young as you use to be, you’re getting on.

Maybe you even want to show off a bit. In which case the literary device is called litotes.

Back to the morning commute. The bus is still nowhere to be seen. You huddle into your coat and think “I’m freezing!”

Bit of an overstatement. You’re exaggerating for the sake of emphasis.

When you claim to be freezing, you’re just feeling the cold. When you say that your bag weighs a ton, you mean that it’s heavy. And if you have a million and one things to do, you’re just busy – and possibly feeling a little bit overwhelmed.

Should you want to show off a tad more, you’re using hyperbole.

Both terms have their roots in Ancient Greek. And as literary devices they are just as long-established. The poet Homer was using them back in 8th Century BC.

The current tendency to overuse litotes and hyperbole means that the full effect of the exaggeration has gradually been lost. Just think, no one is remotely surprised, or indeed concerned, if you say you’re so hungry you could eat a horse.

Homer, on the other hand, gives us hyperbole at its finest.

On a windless day, the hero Achilles finds himself unable to light the funeral pyre of his friend, Patroclus. So, naturally, he prays to the winds for assistance. His prayer is answered: “the two winds rose with a cry that rent the air and swept the clouds before them”.

Crying, renting, sweeping winds. What a vivid picture!

Emulate Homer, the world’s most influential writer: use litotes and hyperbole and avoid the humdrum and the obvious.

A word of warning though. Be sparing in your use. Understatement and overstatement are exaggeration and constant exaggeration is boring.

And the last thing you want to do is bore your reader to, er, death. If you see what I mean.

https://inl.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NEW-INL-LOGO-2017-WEB-1.png00Katharine Morganhttps://inl.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NEW-INL-LOGO-2017-WEB-1.pngKatharine Morgan2017-03-28 12:32:592017-03-28 14:48:33To understate or overstate? A matter of life and death

In the beginning

New words are conceived when existing words join to create a new meaning. For instance, you might have found yourself ‘hangry’, ‘unfriending’ someone or even accused of ‘manspreading’.

Registering the birth

New words are entered into dictionaries. But inclusion in a dictionary is little more than a rite of passage. At least ⅕ of the Oxford English Dictionary’s 231,000 entries are obsolete (Why words die (and how to stop a few of them from keeling over)The Economist 4th-10th March 2017).

New words also have their births announced in the media. This is usually accompanied by debate as to their parentage and, ultimately, as to their future.

The best way to spread the news of a word’s birth is, of course, by word of mouth. After all, “a word needs to be used to live” (ibid. The Economist).

Infancy

Young words go through a trying period. That is to say a period in which they are tried out. For some such as ‘hangry’ and ‘adorkable’ it’s just a phase, and one they grow out of as they are popularised.

Others are not so fortunate. For example, do you multislack at work? Probably, without even realising it.

If you use work-related windows to cover non-work-related ones open on your computer then yes, you multislack.

The American Dialect Society shortlisted multislacking for its 1998 Words of the Year vote. For almost twenty years we’ve been doing it. And yet we still don’t use the specific word that describes it. Multislacking has yet to advance beyond infancy.

Growing up

Once words have been popularised, they mature. Take ‘decimate.’ As a young word in Latin it meant ‘to kill one in ten’. Similarly, ‘μυριάς’ – Ancient Greek for 10,000 – has grown to become the less specific ‘myriad’.

C. S. Lewis uses the example of ‘gentleman’ (The Death of Words, 1944). In its infancy ‘gentleman’ defined a social and heraldic fact, but its meaning has decayed with age. Now, ‘gentleman’ requires what Lewis calls “adjectival parasites” – crutches such as ‘true,’ ‘honest’ and ‘real’ – to survive.

Employment

Words start work as soon as they are born. They are the raw materials for the manufacture of language, which is distributed and used for communication.

This communication is written, spoken, read and heard. But these are not distinct categories: speakers listen, writers read. And vice versa.

So the business of communication is the exchange of information. It is only profitable when it is understood.

For a word to succeed in its job, it needs careful deployment. As shareholders in the business of communication, that is our responsibility.

Reaching the end

Words find that retirement is followed by a quick death. Conversely to their widely-announced birth, a word’s death receives little or no acknowledgement. The fortunate few will have their passing mourned by the likes of The Spectator, the London Review of Books and The Literary Review. Recently, the Guardian published an obituary – ‘Golly’, ‘cassette’ and ‘croquet’: the words we no longer use (15th March 2017).

The circle of life

The ashes of the dead fertilise the soil and so it is with words: see ‘Brexit’.

Do you communicate with your customers on a regular basis? Do you use MailChimp? If not, why not?

Small or medium businesses, understandably, don’t usually have dedicated technology teams to track communications and drill down into the detail of the data.

Sound familiar? If so, it’s not a problem because mass email platforms like MailChimp claim to be able to perform this tracking for you.

More than a billion emails are sent using MailChimp every day, including back-in-stock messages, newsletters and other email campaigns.

Here at Immediate Network, we use MailChimp on a number of our client communications projects, and are well versed in all the features and functions it has to offer.

Using MailChimp is generally pretty straightforward for most business requirements. Should you need it, however, there is comprehensive support documentation available.

One of MailChimp’s greatest strengths lies in its analytics. You can monitor your audience’s web activity – and purchases – to produce revenue reports and help you tailor your online campaigns.

The logistics of a small business can make data hard to wrangle, and MailChimp knows this. Ben Chestnut, the company’s co-founder and CEO, has this to say about data: “We’re watching it, collecting it, and making sure it’s paying off.”

Many of MailChimp’s services are free. If you have a database with 2,000 or fewer names on it, you can send up to 12,000 emails per month at no charge. If you have more than 2,000 recipients, the costs increase as your mailing list grows.

MailChimp provides a number of other useful features. The abandoned cart tool reminds shoppers of forgotten purchases when they reach checkout. MailChimp says that this boosts profits by an average of $610 a month, whilst the product-recommendation feature purportedly increases revenues by an average of 31%.

For 2017, MailChimp is looking at how data science might be used to improve other methods of communication such as social media and snail mail.

Good business practice, like sustainable growth, relies on good quality content. It also relies on reliable distribution of that content. If you have yet to try out MailChimp, what have you got to lose?